Every Sparrow's Fall, 2 of 3
SANTIAGO
Havana 1921
Santiago was from a wealthy family in Cuba. He grew up outside Havana in a large white house with a long porch, and a living room with a radio that looked like the facade of a polished wooden cathedral. He and his father would sit with the windows open and listen to baseball games. Actually, they were recreations of the games. The radio station based in Havana would get the play by play by telegraph from New York and recreate the commentary along with canned bat cracks and crowds cheering. The Yankees had a good year in 1921, the year Santiago turned nine. His father would smoke cigars, and when the game was done they would go out onto lush green grass and play under the shade of the flame tree. Their laughter mingled with the roaring cicadas.
Santiago’s father was called Jorge, and he liked to drink rum. He hated physical work of any kind. He didn’t understand how people could do it. He had been sent as a young man to college in Madrid, where he met Santiago’s mother, Helene. They wed in Madrid and sailed to Havana in 1914. Helene was an elegant young woman and Santiago always remembered her as she was in the 1920s when she was young and warm and gentle as the shade.
Babe Ruth hit 59 home runs in 1921, and each one sent the little family into fits of cheerful laughter. Each at bat brought a magical sense of anticipation.
Jorge discussed baseball as if it were a subject of great philosophical seriousness. If the Yankees lost, he would always rack his brain trying to find the moment where they had lost the momentum.
Or the critical mistake which had cost them the game. But the 1921 Yankees rarely lost and he spent the spring and summer of that year very happily.
Havana, 1925
After an early game on a pretty but humid Saturday morning in May, the family drove out to Santa Maria Del Mar. The water was clear and inviting. Jorge was in good spirits, and he was still ranting to his son about the genius of the Yankees, when Helene walked into the water. She meant to swim out to the sand bar, but was caught up in a rip tide which dragged her under. Her head emerged for a moment, she screamed, and was dragged under again. Jorge ran, then swam to her. He dove for her and after a few minutes he made his way back to shore and collapsed from exhaustion. Santiago stood on the shore dumbfounded.
Jorge went back into the water. Diving and searching until he could not breath. He made his way back to shore. He did it again. Santiago stood there watching, crying for his father to come back, the realization of his mothers death overwhelming him.
The next day, they finally found her body. Some boys were playing on the shore about a mile from where she drowned, and they saw a woman in the water. One boy, thinking it must be some kind of joke, turned over the dead woman who was floating face down. He screamed. Much of her face had been eaten by crabs.
Not long after this Babe Ruth disappeared from the lineup. Jorge was in a highly agitated state as he paced the floor, listening to the radio as if it were news of an impending hurricane.
Then word came that Ruth had collapsed while waiting for a train in North Carolina, then again while waiting to see a doctor in New York. Without him, the Yankees lost game after game. Jorge paced the floor, drinking. The Yankees dropped from 2nd place, to 5th, then finally 7th. Jorge was inconsolable.
New York, 1929
In 1929, Jorge traveled to New York for “business”, really he was there to watch the Yankees win a World Series, and Santiago, who had been in a boarding school in Spain, sailed across the Atlantic to meet him. Santiago watched the surface of the water like a portal to another world. Night after night he watched from the deck as the boat was lifted on mountainous swells. He felt the sink of the ship as it slid down the mountain, and the wind, and the darkness.
He was happy to see his father who was waiting for him on the dock. They embraced. Santiago was not aware of how much he missed his father. In the years they had been apart, Santiago had made Jorge into a legend. Now, here, he seemed smaller.
Santiago was tall and thin like his mother, and as he neared his seventeenth birthday, he looked more and more like her. Santiago had grown a foot since Jorge had seen him last. The boy was beginning to tower over his father, and the feeling was off putting for both of them.
At first they stayed in the Plaza hotel and walked along the park to the games. An old woman at the hotel had told Jorge that The Polo Grounds was just north of the park. But she had never been to Harlem, let alone the Polo Grounds, and they walked until they had blisters on their feet to make it to opening day. The Yankees were incredible. They waited for a long time after the crowd thinned out to find a taxi back to the hotel. They soon found a suitable accommodations n Harlem.
Each day, Jorge would make a show of reading several newspapers with his breakfast and coffee. He would call his friend at the bank.
Sometimes they would meet for lunch and Jorge would always come home drunk. This fig leaf was to preserve his dignity more than anything, though Santiago could have cared less if his father worked. His father was rich and so he did not have to work, Santiago reasoned, without any sense of judgement.
Santiago and his father attended every home game that year. The Yankees won their first three games, but so did their rivals the Boston Red Sox, who, in fact, went on to win six in a row, leaving the Yankees one game out of first place at the end of the first week. Jorge was nervous but optimistic. He wasn’t worried about the Red Sox, he said. If the Yankees play the right kind of baseball, they would make it to the World Series, as they had the previous three years. Jorge was sure of it.
The 12th game of his he year was played against the Pittsburg Pirates, whose new starting pitcher, Edmund Meadows, gave up back to back home runs. First to Gehrig, then to Ruth. The Yankees ended the 1st inning up 3, and by the time they pulled the exhausted Pittsburg starter in the 6th inning, the Yankees led by 9. Then the Pirates scored 5 in the 8th, and 4 more in the 9th to send the game into extra innings.
It was a cool spring morning in New York. Jorge was sweating profusely. Though Jorge was always careful in America to show that he spoke English, even going so far as to insist that Santiago address him in English when in public, he began to shout at the opposing players in Spanish, drawing looks from some of the people with them in the stands.
The Yankees bullpen had suffered a series of injuries during spring trading that year, and had been used extensively the first week of the season, and was about to be exposed. The pitcher they sent out meet the Pirates in the 10th was Andrew Jackson Webber, a sad eyed kid from Texas, tall and slender, sweat dripping from his worried brow, and he regretted the first pitch just as it left his hand and he didn’t look back whe a young Pittsburg outfielder smashed the ball into the upper deck. The crowd was in a frenzy. The next pitch was also a regrettable one and also left the yard. The joy had left the crowd, and many people began to shuffle out. The Yankees came up short in the bottom of the inning and the game was over. Jorge and Santiago walked back to the hotel in silence.
The Yankees were never able to overtake the Red Sox that year. They finished in second place, 18 games back. The team the father and son watched that year were a great baseball team, with an explosive offense, and ended the 29 season with a record of 88-66. But anything short of the World Series felt like a failure.
Ten days after the end of the 29 season, the stock market crashed. Jorge lost nearly all the money he had inherited from his own father. He would even have to sell the house in Havana to cover his debts and finish paying for his son’s education. Santiago was on a ship bound for Spain, watching the horizon, when his father jumped off a cliff into the East River and drowned.
Madrid, 1936
Santiago studied philosophy at Universidad Central de Madrid. He was a talented student, who benefited from a cool temperament and a steady, analytical mind. Another benefit he had was that he did not deeply care for the politics of Spain. Neither the right nor the left, he thought, could rob him of his life’s pleasure, so long as he had a half dozen books, a pen and paper. And so as elections, and rebellions, and strikes distressed his classmates, they meant nothing to him. Too much of himself was left across the Atlantic.
His freshman year he had sparked up a friendship with another Cuban boy named Romero. The boys were instantly connected by their shared love of baseball. Romero studied literature, and was a communist. They had the idea to create baseball teams to take advantage of the already combative and competitive atmosphere between the two groups of underclassmen. They found eager recruits, though neither team was especially good at baseball. The philosophy students played the literature students in their first game in 1934. The philosophy students won 5-4, and everyone went off and got drunk. In the two years since, the two teams had played dozens of games, and since no one had written down the outcomes, it was unclear to either side how many games had been won or lost. Both sides claimed victory. That same year the Yankees won 100 games, 20 games ahead of the Tigers, and they would go on to win the World Series against the New York Giants, 4 games to 2. In those four games the Yankees outscored the Giants 49 to 17. Santiago wept when he read the news.
Madrid, 1939
Three years passed, and Santiago continued his studies in philosophy. He became fascinated with an idea that had first come to him while listening to his father discuss baseball.
“In life, baseball, and in politics”, he wrote, “we tend to overestimate individual agency and underestimate the role of discrete causal processes. In baseball, elite hitters succeed only 30–40% of the time, despite often doing everything correctly…
This suggests that outcomes, are heavily shaped by complex, intersecting causes beyond any one agent’s control. Accordingly, the epistemic position of participants in such systems is one of causal opacity: actions and outcomes are only loosely correlated, and reliable feedback is limited. Success may reflect favorable variance, i.e. luck, as much as virtue or skill.”
The sun was going down on the city, and Santiago was packing his things to leave, he could hear the sounds of a baseball game coming together on the lawn, when a confident, eager young man named David knocked on the door of Santiago’s tiny office. Just as Santiago stood to answer the door he heard the crack of a bat coming from the field outside and the sound of breaking glass.